1964 Volvo P210

Just Duett

Feature Article from Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car

The spare tire for a Volvo P210 rides in a compartment tucked away under the cargo floor, where exposure to road salt is a death sentence for the lightly protected steel. If you want an exercise in frustration, try to find a replacement that hasn't been devoured by rust. Just try. Holly Stump certainly did. She called all of her contacts in the vintage Volvo world; when none of those panned out, she looked into having a new compartment made, only to learn that the complex stampings used in its construction would make it ridiculously expensive to duplicate with any accuracy.
Then she got a break. One of her contacts had heard from a collector in Sweden who had discovered an NOS spare tire compartment and wanted to see it go to someone "whose project was worthy." Holly's contact vouched for her, and the coveted sheetmetal was soon on its way to her Ipswich, Massachusetts, home. She was also able to get a rare spare tire door, swapped straight up for a set of taillamps from a Lincoln Town Car.
If Holly has had a secret weapon for overcoming the many frustrations and challenges in the restoration of her 1964 P210, it's been her passion for the seldom-seen Swedish wagon. It was passion that led her to stay with the project after six years at a restoration shop left her with an unfinished car, and passion that persuaded another restorer to take on what was essentially a rolling chassis, a body in primer and several boxes of unlabeled parts. "She seemed very passionate about the car, and that's something that I like to see," said Roberto Donati, whose shop, Scuderia Donati, redid some marginal work and carried the restoration through to its successful conclusion.
Volvos had been part of Holly's life since 1985, when her mother bought her a 1968 144 as her first car. "I hated it at the time, but grew to love it," she said. "I became a total Volvo fan--I put 100,000 miles on that car with nothing but maintenance." When she saw a photo of a surfboard-toting P210, also known as the Duett, in an advertisement, she was smitten. She located her quarry in upstate New York, and, after a year of haggling, persuaded the owner to sell. "I'd say it was roadworthy, but not exceptional. It would pass inspection," she said.
Holly drove the car for nine years, taking it off the road in the winter and replacing parts only when necessary. Finally, the endless creep of rust and the deterioration of the front end could be ignored no longer. "It was dangerously roadworthy. Crush it or fix it were the options," she said. She decided to have a ground-up restoration done.
Holly was full of optimism as she delivered the car to a restoration shop that had been recommended by a friend of a friend. "The car is in the shop now (just starting to get taken apart) and I should get it back in May," she wrote in her project log back in 1999. How could she have known that she was embarking on a six-year voyage of disappointment? By the winter of 2004, the car was only about one-third done. Rusty sections of the frame had been cut out and replaced with fresh metal, and a crack revealed by pressure washing had been welded. The frame had been sandblasted, primed and finished, worn-out rear springs and brake drums had been replaced, and the rotted lower A-arms of the front suspension had been repaired. The restorer had also sheared away all the rotted metal from the body and welded in repair panels he had fabricated.
In the winter of 2004, Holly came to a realization. "I knew the car had to be moved to a new shop if I ever wanted to see it finished. The hardest part of executing this plan was finding the shop owner and getting a return phone call." In March of 2005, she showed up with a ramp truck and took her car home. Did she agonize over taking such a drastic step? Not really. "I knew it wasn't going to get done where it was, so I wasn't risking much in pulling it out," she said.
This is the point at which many a frustrated owner cuts his losses and puts the unfinished car up for sale. Not Holly. Determined to get her Volvo back together again, and armed with her hard-won experience and the support of her husband, John, she began her search for another restoration shop. She began getting references from the contacts she had made, and narrowed the field down to four candidates, whom she invited to her home to inspect the Duett. One of the four was Roberto Donati, who had recently left the highly respected Paul Russell and Company to open his own restoration shop, Scuderia Donati, in Ipswich. "One of the things that struck me was how passionate about the car she was, and the second was how hurt she was that the guy had abandoned the project," Roberto said. "I told her that I will do the best that I possibly can. I really wanted her to have the car and drive the car."
Roberto had been accustomed to working on six- and seven-figure cars that you might see at Meadow Brook or Pebble Beach, and the work done up to that point on Holly's Volvo was below his standards. "She didn't want to start from scratch. She asked me if I could just paint it for her," he said. They agreed on a timetable and a budget, and Roberto promised to fit the car in with his other projects.
Scuderia Donati addressed the excessive body filler that was preventing one of the rear windows from fitting properly, and carried out as little bodywork as possible, sandblasting and repairing problem areas. The doors and fenders were re-primed and block sanded to bring them up to the shop's standards, and Roberto agreed to try to use the DuPont paint that Holly had bought years earlier and stored in her basement, saving her the $800 to $900 that a gallon of new paint would have cost. Holly wanted neither the Desert Sand shade that her Volvo wore when it was new nor the red that it had been repainted, and chose instead to have it finished in Pearl White, "the nicest color that a 1964 Duett came in." Roberto applied the paint with a SATA Jet gravity-feed HVLP gun in the shop's semi-downdraft paint booth.
The shop sandblasted and painted the wheels, installed the new wiring harness from Scandcar, and took care of the million-and-one details of assembling the car. "Basically, all of the parts were in boxes. There must have been 15 to 20 boxes of various parts of the car." It would have been a challenge even if Roberto's expertise had been in 1960s Volvos, which it wasn't. "I only saw one of these [Duetts] when I was living in Europe many years ago. We didn't have many photographs, either. We went to look at another car to see what kind of plating was used, and all that stuff."
By the fall of 2005, after less than six months in Roberto's care, the Volvo was assembled and running--on budget. "He gave me an estimate, and he stuck with it," Holly said. He stored the car through the winter of 2005-'06, after which the car went to G & L Auto Interiors of Kittery, Maine, for the installation of its reproduction dove gray upholstery, ordered from Scandcar. Holly refurbished the wooden cargo area slats, applying "like 10 coats" of varnish after the wood had been run through a planer. Holly's brother, Daryl Sheltry, the proprietor of a performance shop, rebuilt the carburetor. Otherwise, the rugged, 1,778cc inline-four needed no attention.
It's no longer her daily driver, but Holly uses the Volvo regularly, taking it to shows and on pleasure drives. "It gets a ton of attention. Mostly when I take it to a show, people say, 'I've never seen one.' It's fun to show up with something that car buffs have never seen." It's a good driver, as well. "It's like a little tractor. It has plenty of power and not much speed," Holly said. "Fifty-five or 60 [mph] is about it."
She has no regrets about the money spent on the Duett--"I plan on keeping the car for my lifetime," she said--but would have done things differently in choosing her first restoration shop. "Don't let a low price drive your choices," she cautioned. "And, if you have any reservations, keep looking."

This article originally appeared in the November, 2007 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.